Hurricane Katrina: One Familys Survival Story
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She still has bad days, when she misses her house which was foreclosed upon and the food and, even, the "stuff" she once didn't think mattered. One holiday, making dinner, she asked the girls to find one particular serving dish. For a moment, they stood in the kitchen in silence.
And then they reminded her: I get a heart pang," says Thomas.
Surviving Hurricane Katrina: One Family's Story: Paperback
Sit there and sulk and wallow in it? Instead the family has moved on, with strength and spirit, and help from many: Thomas was laid off in May. Instead of teaching, she's working now at a warehouse, but even this she takes in stride. She plans to begin taking online classes in medical sonography. A few weeks ago, they ran into each other at a restaurant, hugged, caught up and made plans to go to church together. Thomas hasn't been back to New Orleans since , when she and the children attended a family reunion. She knows she's not likely to ever live there again. But she'll always have reminders of home, even a small atlas she purchased that day she boarded the plane for Arizona, to see just how far they were going.
On its mileage chart, she drew a thin line connecting New Orleans and Phoenix. Rick Teissier says New Orleans 'grew up' after Katrina What Rick Teissier remembers most about those early months after Hurricane Katrina was the scene in his neighborhood pharmacy: Some, he says, were waiting for Xanax. Or other drugs that would ease the anxiety and shell shock of living in a city still reeling from disaster.
Everyone had prescriptions, Teissier included. Five years later, Rick Teissier, lawyer, agitator, passionate booster of all things New Orleans, has rebounded from those stressful days but it was a long, circuitous journey. He left his beloved city for California, then returned. He gave up his practice, then came back and started over. He sold his house in Uptown, then bought another in the same neighborhood. He and his family fled to Las Vegas in one of the last pre-Katrina flights out.
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Later, his wife and young daughter temporarily relocated to Destin, Fla. He commuted there regularly, while working sporadically as a criminal defense lawyer amid the ruins of New Orleans. Katrina had crippled the legal system, flooding the state courthouse, destroying files and contaminating evidence. Teissier also accepted appointment as a special master to get the city's indigent defense program back on track. It wasn't his first exposure to legal chaos. A decade earlier, when he was a public defender, he had sued his own office, arguing he had too many clients and not enough resources — and the state Supreme Court agreed, mandating reforms.
But a year after Katrina, he and his wife, Nissa, decided New Orleans was no place to raise a family. With a baby daughter and another child on the way, he says, "You knew this was going to be a very long battle and wear on you a great deal. You didn't think things were EVER going to get back to normal. Even so, driving out of town on Interstate 10, he recalls, was like "leaving a lover you still loved. Teissier recalls a judge who is an old friend warning him he'd be miserable anyplace else and offering a prediction.
You're going to live here the rest of your life. You're going to die here. You may not know that now, but you'll realize it someday. At the time, though, California seemed a logical place for a new beginning. His in-laws lived there, and he and his family moved in with them.
Thomas was laid off in May. He sold his house in Uptown, then bought another in the same neighborhood. Kourtney, 18, won a scholarship to The University of Arizona in Tucson. Teissier longed for the intoxicating scents of jasmine flowers and ligustrum trees, the taste of fresh oysters, even the feel of the humidity on his skin. Hurricane Katrina five years later JavaScript is required to view our full story experience.
With its sunny skies, palm trees and Kodachrome vistas, what's not to like? Plenty, as it turned out. He recalls her complaint: It's really messing with my head. Give me garbage and funky smells. Teissier longed for the intoxicating scents of jasmine flowers and ligustrum trees, the taste of fresh oysters, even the feel of the humidity on his skin. What really cinched his decision, though, was something far more practical: He failed the California bar exam.
Weeks before, he says, he developed an eye infection, forcing him to wear a patch and making it hard to study.
He learned the exam's results, coincidentally, while in New Orleans to deal with a prospective buyer for his house. He remembers being at Cooter Brown's tavern, downing some oysters and beer, he says, when his wife handed him an envelope that included the announcement he'd failed, just narrowly.
Teissier knew he could take the exam again, but he saw the results as a sign "the spirit of New Orleans didn't want me to leave. Returning in , he bunked with a friend for seven months before finding a house that's now home for his family, which includes daughters Grace, 6, and Addy, 4, who was born in California.
Back then, though, it still was hard to get anything accomplished with limited city services and exasperating red tape. Teissier moved fast to re-establish his law practice.
Tony Bridges and his daughters, three-year-old Brooke and eight-year-old Shania, are just one of the families Nybo met who are struggling to. In Surviving Hurricane Katrina: One Family's Story, family members tell of pulling people from rooftops, swaying at the top of a fancy high-rise.
Let's go out and drink. Before, New Orleans was like a teenage city. I think Katrina made us like people in their 40s who start to think about bigger issues The 'city that care forgot' started to think about caring. It made us a more grown-up place, more mature, with a conscience. At the fifth Katrina anniversary, Teissier, now 48, has no sense of dread, just an acceptance that another monster storm could strike. We don't sit around and fear. How you react to them will make the biggest difference," Teissier says.
Recalling convention center chaos with dog, still waiting for home Gussie Glapion's path through New Orleans often takes her past the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the new sea-blue carpet and a Starbucks visible through the blocks-long wall of glass and metal stretching along the Mississippi River waterfront. Maybe it's buried in my subconscious. But like the rest of her city, the year-old Glapion is still rebuilding, still recovering. Glapion was one of thousands who ignored Mayor Ray Nagin's pleas to evacuate the low-lying city as Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane, approached.
She was raised in the little "double shotgun" house at 2nd Street that her mother had purchased from a minister in the city's Uptown neighborhood, and it had never flooded.
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Once the storm had passed, Glapion went outside to assess the damage: Somehow, her phone line still worked, letting her keep in regular touch with her daughter, Quianna, a teacher in Houston. By Wednesday, though, Quianna told her she needed to get out. They got buses down there waiting to pick you all up. Glapion grabbed a bag of snacks and her year-old Pomeranian, Osa, and trudged through the flooded streets toward the river.
Surviving Hurricane Katrina: One Family's Story: Paperback by Carolyn E. Dallinger | Blurb Books
But when she arrived at the convention center, there were no buses, just pandemonium. As many as 20, people had gathered there — residents, stranded tourists, even some fleeing the squalor and chaos of the shelter in the nearby Superdome. Not only were there no buses, but there was no food or water or sanitary facilities for the masses who thought this would be their salvation. At a side entrance, one corpse sat in a wheelchair while another lay on the ground beside it, wrapped in a sheet.
On the grassy median of Convention Center Boulevard, an old man lay dead in a chaise longue. Hearing rumors of rapes, killings and armed gangs roaming the building's fetid innards, Glapion decided to sleep outside on a stiff chair scavenged from an exhibition hall.
Katrina: One family’s survival story
During the day, she wandered the streets or sat on a bench down the street, to get away — and to pray. People ate whatever they could scrounge up. One day, there were frozen treats from a ransacked Blue Bell ice cream truck; on another, Glapion ate cookies liberated from an abandoned bakery van. Always at her side, Osa was subsisting on Slim Jims and bits of granola bar until, miraculously, a bag of Kibbles 'n Bits appeared.
Especially after that second night and into the third morning with no food, no water at all, more and more folks just wading and swimming up there and floating in on rafts and plastic swimming pools and wheelbarrow tubs and all kinds of stuff. Folks were getting desperate and mean. So up to then we was sitting it out, just waiting and hoping and trying to stay invisible to the Bad Guys. Some kid, maybe eight years old, climbed up on the overpass railing, and as soon as he got to the top, he just slips and falls right over.
Down maybe 50ft and into the water. So we just saw that baby die and nobody did a thing. I could see the faces of the people that was stealing and robbing from folks. Lot of plastic tubes in a row, about three feet across, like one of those things you use to float in a swimming pool. And he looks me in the face and looks at the wife and child, and he gives me that mattress, not saying another word.
Life since Katrina: 3 stories of survival
But I keep on, not wanting to see no more of that overpass. She starts screaming and pointing and she falls off the mat into the water right by this dead guy. I quick get around to the side to hold Junior on, and push that dead man away. And then I grab Alisha and holler at her to stop and try and get her up on the mat again so we can get going. Folks was nice to us, took care of us and made sure we was OK.
They went out of their way to make us feel like we was worth something. And I try to help, help somebody every day. Makes me feel good. We are who we were, and who we remain. I asked how he had done in the storm, a standard opening to conversation in those days. Topics New Orleans Hurricane Katrina: Hurricane Katrina Louisiana features. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded.